Thursday, September 4, 2014

When you click a point in Google Earth you'll often get a pop-up appear. Formatting in balloons is often important, e.g. in this nice example of 'old photo compared to new photo' you need to have the photos the right size, captions and a link to the source is important. Problem is you can't do this sort of formatting easily within Google Earth unless you're an expert in HTML.

The point shown in the screen shot was created using the technique I'm about to explain including uploading the photos to blogger.

HowTo
1] Sign up to Blogger.com. It's OK if you have no intention of using a blog, you don't have to publish anything.

2] Create a new post. By default a button top left will be 'Compose' rather than 'HTML' . That's good. Use the tools provided to upload photos and arrange your text how you want it.

3] Now click the 'HTML' button mentioned already. You'll see a load of weird text, this is the HTML that actually made the page you were working on. Copy it all.

6] Now clicking your placemark (Places column on the left or in the main screen) will pop up your nicely formatted balloon.

7] when you're happy, go back and turn off your blogger post, no need to publish your post for your pop-ups to work (although you might want to save it/them and reuse the structure another time)

Extra stuff:Pop-ups for areas and Lines: While a placemark works in my example (two photos work well as a point), you may want a balloon associated with an area, e.g. a large building or a line, e.g. a railway. You can create a pop-up for these too, just create as you did with the placemark and put your HTML in the description box as before. Clicking the line or area will produce a pop-up in exactly the same way.

Another Advantage: The technique has the advantage that you can use blogger to host your photos, you can put photos for pop ups in the KMZ file Google Earth creates but its buggy in the current version (see earlier post) so this technique not only makes it easy to format a photo pop-up, it solves that problem too.

Disadvantage:you need to be online to write a blogger post and for someone to view any photos in the pop-ups you create, they'll also have to be online.